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Active duty Navy Commander and 2011 Harvard Extension School Master of Liberal Arts (A.L.M.) grad Ted Johnson has been selected to participate in the prestigious White House Fellows program. Of the 15 chosen to participate, more than half hold degrees from Harvard, with Johnson being the first Harvard Extension School graduate selected for the program.

Johnson applied for the fellowship while completing his A.L.M. thesis in international relations. He was selected as part of the class which began the fellowship in August 2011 with a placement in the Department of Energy. Prior to his placement, he served on the faculty at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, RI, where he was a cyberspace and information operations military professor.

Says Johnson upon receiving this opportunity, “I hope to serve as further proof of the invaluable experience the Extension School affords.”

Founded in 1964, the President’s Commission on White House Fellowships is one of America’s most prestigious programs for leadership and public service. White House Fellowships offer exceptional young men and women first-hand experience working at the highest levels of the Federal government.

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Growing out of a longstanding commitment to sharing knowledge about the natural world, the Arnold Arboretum’s educational programming for children began in the 1980s with the introduction of field study opportunities in the historical landscape. While this programming continues to thrive today, the Arboretum’s Boston Teachers Union School collaboration is designed to provide science instruction as an integral part of student learning throughout the school year. Funded through the generous support of a private donor, the program includes lessons on plant and animal life but also nurtures a broader understanding of science in general, intending to spark curiosity through thought-provoking activities that promote observation, reasoning, and language skills.

Collaborating with the BTU School has opened avenues of discovery for both students and their instructors, and both teachers and parents have noticed a spike in the children’s enthusiasm for learning science. In addition to engaging students in the classroom, the Arboretum hosted the students for field studies in the landscape, creating opportunities for students to expand on their indoor experiments through an exploration of the Arboretum’s living collection of plants. Some of the students will learn elementary botany by growing plants in their classrooms this spring, and all will return to the landscape when the weather warms to continue to learn about science in the field. Whether in the classroom or on the Arboretum grounds, students and educators both look forward to the continued flowering of this unique educational partnership.

Learn more about the Boston Teachers Union School and its partnership with the Arnold Arboretum.

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As part of the Harvard College General Education course Science of the Physical Universe 24: “Introduction to Technology & Society,” students and members of the Harvard community are invited to check out market ready alternative vehicle technologies in automobiles that are presently being sold.

• Day & Time: Wed, Feb. 15, 1-2:30 p.m.
• Location: In front of Maxwell Dworkin (33 Oxford Street)

Cars on display will include the Chevy Volt, Nissan Leaf, and Ford Fusion Hybrid.

Representatives will be there to answer any questions.

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Katia Bertoldi, assistant professor of applied mechanics at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), has won a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

The honor is considered one of the most prestigious for up-and-coming researchers in science and engineering.

Bertoldi’s research involves the use of continuum mechanics and applied mathematics to model the mechanical behavior of novel materials at the small scale, such as nano-composites and biological composites.

The $400,000 CAREER Award (“BuckliOrigami: Soft, Active and Foldable Structures Through Instabilities and Large Deformation”) will support her research in exploiting the non-linear behavior of soft structures with purposeful design patterns to create a new class of responsive origami-like materials.

Possible and exciting applications include reversible encapsulation systems, active materials for on-demand drug delivery, rapidly expandable shelters, and robots that can squeeze themselves through small openings and into tight places.

Bertoldi plans to use the grant to promote interdisciplinary research and teaching and to increase the interactions between mechanicians, engineers, physicists, and materials scientists.

Prior to her appointment at Harvard, Bertoldi was an assistant professor at the University of Twente in the Netherlands.

She earned a Ph.D. in mechanics of materials and structures from the University of Trento in Italy; an international master’s in structural engineering from Chalmers University of Technology in Goteborg, Sweden; and a Laurea Degree in Civil Engineering from the University of Trento.

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As revolutionaries go — and he is one, embracing a dynamic new conception of humanistic research in the digital age — Jeffrey Schnapp is really quite grounded. He’s a medievalist, for one thing, a Dante scholar with impeccable credentials and a long track record in all the traditional scholarly forms. And although he founded a collaborative research lab at Harvard to incubate experimental models of knowledge creation and dissemination, he still publishes books, and still uses conventional channels to distribute them.

In short, Schnapp, one of the leading theorists of an emerging set of scholarly practices referred to as the digital humanities, doesn’t intend to shock anyone with talk of a book-less, print-less e-future for the academy. Instead, he makes a persuasive case for what he calls a “print-plus” model of inquiry — a model that exploits the power of new analytic and narrative tools, a model in which iterative process, not just outcome, is important, a model in which print is one of many knowledge-sharing media.

Schnapp helped pioneer this new way of thinking about humanistic practice as the founder of the influential Humanities Lab at Stanford, where he held the Pierotti Chair of Italian Studies before moving to Harvard in 2011. Now he is the faculty director of metaLAB at Harvard, a new research engine for the arts and humanities that is housed at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, a University-wide initiative. He is also a professor of Romance languages and literatures and of comparative literature, building productive ties with Ph.D. students across FAS disciplines, who are among metaLAB’s co-founders and most active members. And as a cultural historian who has curated art and architecture installations, he is on the teaching faculty at the Graduate School of Design (GSD).

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From exploring citizen participation in rural China to assessing how public deliberations in California can engage citizens, HKS’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation continues to be at the forefront of understanding democracy’s challenges.

In early February 2012, the Center announced a deepened commitment to studying democracy by devoting $350,000 each year to faculty and student research that aims to bridge the wide gulf that separates the ideal of democracy from its imperfect practice in the real world. Called the “Challenges to Democracy,” this grant program will fund HKS faculty-led research projects and seminars as well as post-doctoral and doctoral fellowships for students throughout the Harvard community.

“We are pleased to offer such a substantial amount of funding to support research on strengthening democratic practices and the institutional innovation that is necessary to maintain and expand democratic participation and engagement around the world” said Tony Saich, director of the Ash Center. “We hope that this support will engage Harvard’s vibrant intellectual community in the exploration of key challenges in these areas and that it will also push ahead not just our thinking, but also our curriculum design.”

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Using whole-genome sequencing, a team led by researchers from Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) and the Broad Institute has traced the path of the E. coli outbreak that sickened thousands and killed more than 50 people in Germany in summer 2011 and also caused a smaller outbreak in France. It is one of the first uses of genome sequencing to study the dynamics of a food-borne outbreak and provides further evidence that genomic tools can be used to investigate future outbreaks and provide greater insight into the emergence and spread of infectious diseases.

The study, conducted in collaboration with groups at the Pasteur Institute in France, Assistance Publique-Hôpitaux de Paris, and Statens Serum Institut in Denmark, appears on February 6, 2012 in an advance online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“A genome contains the record of a strain’s evolutionary history, so by looking at the differences between the genomes of multiple bacteria from an outbreak we can get really useful clues about what happened in the outbreak. In this way, tracking outbreaks is like detective work, and this approach will be a powerful tool in trying to understand future outbreaks,” said lead author Yonatan Grad, a research fellow in the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics, Department of Epidemiology at HSPH and infectious disease physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

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People with higher-than-average levels of omega-3 fatty acids in their blood may be roughly 30 percent less likely than those with the lowest levels to develop atrial fibrillation, according to new Harvard School of Public Health research. Atrial fibrillation is a dangerous condition that tends to strike the elderly and can lead to stroke or heart failure.

“A 30 percent lower risk of the most common chronic arrhythmia in the United States population is a pretty big effect,” Dariush Mozaffarian, associate professor in the Department of Epidemiology and senior author of the report, told Reuters.

The study, led by epidemiology department research fellow Jason Wu, was published online in the journal Circulation, Jan. 26, 2012. The researchers took blood samples from more than 3,300 adults over age 65 and tracked their health over 14 years to see how many developed atrial fibrillation.

The omega-3 fatty acids measured in the study are found in oily fish, fish oil supplements, and in some enriched foods, like eggs. While many health experts recommend eating fish at least twice a week, Mozaffarian told Reuters that most Americans don’t meet those goals. But he said the new study “should change people’s motivation.”

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Over the past decade, scientists have produced a flurry of studies exploring the role of genetic (nature) and environmental factors (nurture) in youth depression, but there has been little consensus on how depression is jointly impacted by specific genes and external factors, such as poverty, abuse, and negative family relationships.

The lack of a clear understanding of how genes and environments both contribute to childhood depression led Erin Dunn, postdoctoral research fellow and recent graduate of the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH), and her colleagues to do a comprehensive review of studies that tested for gene-environment interaction in youth depression. Their goal was to systematically identify these studies, examine the methods used, and summarize findings to guide future studies. The review was published December, 2011 in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry (JCPP). Read the abstract.

Dunn, a former Richmond Fellow at the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University, has had a longstanding interest in children’s mental health ever since teaching in early childhood and elementary school settings, where she saw students with a variety of mental health issues.

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Alvin Curran will bring his thoughts and experiences to Harvard as the Louis C. Elson Lecturer, and will talk about his uncommon music and life on Tuesday, Feb. 28, at 5:15 p.m. in John Knowles Paine Concert Hall on the Harvard University campus (Harvard Square Red Line T stop). Paine Hall is wheelchair accessible, and the lecture is free, no tickets required. See www.music.fas.harvard.edu.

Democratic, irreverent and traditionally experimental, Curran makes music for every occasion with any sounding phenomena — a volatile mix of lyricism and chaos, structure and indeterminacy, fog horns, fiddles, and fiddle heads. He is dedicated to the restoration of dignity to the profession of making non-commercial music.

Early in his career, composer Curran co-founded the radical music collective MUSICA ELETTRONICA VIVA, and composed for Rome’s avant garde theater scene. In the 70s, he created a poetic series of solo works for synthesizer, voice, taped sounds and found objects. Seeking to develop new musical spaces—and considered one of the leading figures in making music outside of the concert halls—he developed a series of concerts for lakes, ports, parks, buildings, quarries and caves. In the 1980s, Curran extended the ideas of musical geography by creating simultaneous radio concerts for three, then six, large ensembles performing together from many European capitals. He has also created a body of solo performance works and a series of sound installations, some of them in collaboration with visual artists including Paul Klerr, Melissa Gould, Kristin Jones, Pietro Fortuna, Umberto Bignardi, and Uli Sigg. Curran’s more than 150 works feature taped/sampled natural sounds, piano, synthesizers, computers, violin, percussion, shofar, ship horns, accordion and chorus.

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Current Issue

Harvard University Gazette February 2-15, 2012

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